Gilbert Ryle quotes

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When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application o...f the Protestant notion of conscience. ... "Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind w...hen he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the ...Machine." I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser ma...y say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »